Tarnishes

Her eyelids are seashells in the steady glow of the night-time. The yellow of streetlamps occasionally illuminate their iridescence as the spilling light explains pale irises and attempts to articulate the dark lashes so loved by the fragile and the brave. It is a dank night tonight with only a sliver of time for a busy woman to squander. She is a smattering of penciled notes cramped into margins, carefully groomed brows, the right hint of coral, a face shining marvelous from past endurances conquered.

An Argument

Inconsequential noise blares out like vapor, which turns into a gradual buildup of smoke tumbling out into fat, white plumes angry to be alive. It is invitingly terse and choking with a friction that caresses and jolts and turns and then we duck! Away from the harrowing noise because everything is noise, and loud crashing sounds that corner you are intrusive in their own right, bereft of logic and reason and respect and sanctity of character, everything is crashing plates and a pointless mess over petty things not worth gritting one’s teeth over.

But anger, in its abundance, is full-flavored and robust in the way that it, too, is something extreme and extremes have been lacking in its coloring of your existence. For awhile now, you have been content with things as is. You acknowledge you are luckier than most, you see that you are no longer chained down to circumstances which once stained your nights long and tense with displeasure, you see your talents and areas in which you lack with enough clarity to savor the potential highs of which you are able to reach. Some days there still remain reminders of the haunting inadequacies; of never being surrounded or understood by a community that would feel enough like ‘home’, how they never really tried anyway, but you had long ago accepted this as a fact of life faced by everybody, and everybody has to endure.

By the time it is done, because arguments too can expire, your face is red with the result of having abrasive words hurled at you again, you realize that you had been phasing out in the last ten minutes or so because the words, and the inelegant combination in which they were used and not used, had ceased to make sense. You think, sardonically at that, that if the point of every argument is to win, then surely you are glad that you never took it to pursue a career in becoming a lawyer because your losses have become innumerable and why the hell do people talk so damn much anyway?